1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an endoscope system for controlling medical equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a surgical operation using an endoscope in the related art, an operator records an image of a state during a surgical operation in a recording device (hereinafter referred to as VTR), and confirms what kind of treatment he/she has performed from the movement of a treatment tool or from the state of a tissue after the surgical operation.
In the endoscope system, a preset number and times of outputs of an electric scalpel, the amount of air supply of an aeroperitoneum device, the change of the abdominal pressure of a patient can be stored as medical information, so that whether or not the surgical operation has been performed adequately can be confirmed.
Both of the above-described recording methods are effective as evidence of performance of the surgical operation. However, only one of the VTR and the medical information is not sufficient for understanding how the surgical operation has been performed at the time of confirmation after the surgical operation. If both can be associated with each other, the history of the surgical operation can be more accurately reproduced.
For example, in JP-A-2003-76786 and JP-A-2003-70748, a technology of taking an endoscopic image by a personal computer (PC) as digital data, distributing the endoscopic image via a network transmission together with medical information, and displaying them on the destination PC simultaneously is proposed.
In such a related art, since an endoscopic camera device, an aeroperitoneum device, a blood-pressure measuring device, an electric scalpel device which are peripheral devices are separately provided devices, timelag occurs often in clock information among the respective devices. There also exists delay time due to the communication. Therefore, there arises such a problem that when an image during the surgical operation is reproduced together with the medical information output from the respective peripheral devices after the surgical operation for confirmation, since the image information taken by the endoscope camera and the medical information showing the operating state of other peripheral devices cannot be synchronized with each other, an accurate information display cannot be obtained.